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Facebook to improve privacy policies under FTC settlement

Social giant agrees to privacy audits and explicit user consent for data sharing

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has settled its privacy case with Facebook, after the social network agreed to tighten up its privacy procedures.

The case centred around charges that Facebook “deceived” users by telling them their data was confidential, while allowing that information to be shared and made public.

Under the terms of the settlement, Facebook now has to clearly notify users before sharing any of their data, and also obtain their explicit consent to do so.

However, this will only apply to Facebook users who have the appropriate privacy controls in place, so there is still a loophole for the social network to share such data from subscribers who are lax over updating their privacy settings.

Facebook has also agreed to undertake privacy audits from an independent third party every two years.

The Facebook settlement follows hot on the heels of rival web giant Google being fined by the FTC, also for privacy violations.

Google on Thursday agreed to pay a $22.5m fine to settle charges that it misled users about the use of behaviour-tracking cookies in the Apple Safari web browser, which meant they were served with cookies when visiting Google sites, overriding the browser privacy settings.

User privacy has long been an issue for Google, which relies on search and targeted advertising for the overwhelming majority of its revenues.

The company prompted an international outcry when officials learned that cars used to collect images for the Google Street View service were eavesdropping on activity from passing Wi-Fi networks.

Earlier this week, Google announced that it would be integrating Gmail messages into web search results, prompting V3 to question whether additional privacy concerns could surface for the company.